“She wan’t maligned,” Hester exclaimed, misinterpreting the meaning of the word. “It was a lie, the whole on’t. She never left this house except for church or parties, and only three of them, one to Miss Johnson’s, one to Squire Schofield’s, and one to Mrs. Lennox’s, and a few calls, from the time she came here till after you was born; I know, I was here, I was your nurse, I waited on her, and loved her like my own from the moment she cried so on my neck and said she didn’t want to come here. She was too young to come as his wife. She was nothin’ but a child, and when she couldn’t stan’ the racket any longer she run away.”
Roger was shaking now as with an ague fit. Here was something which Hester could not deny. Jessie had run away and left him, her baby boy. There was no getting smoothly over that, and he shivered with pain as the old woman went on:
“I don’t pretend to excuse her, though there’s a good deal to be said on both sides, and it most broke her heart, as a body who see her as I did that last night at home would know.”
“Hester,” Roger said, and his voice was full of anguish, “why must you tell all this. It surely has nothing to do with the matter under consideration, and I would rather be spared, if possible, or at least hear it alone.”
“I must tell it,” Hester rejoined, “to show you why I hid the will, and why he made it, and how big a lie that woman told him.”
There was the most intense scorn in her voice every time she said “that woman,” and Mrs. Walter Scott winced under it, but had no redress then; her time for that would be by and by, she reflected, and assuming a haughty indifference she was far from feeling she kept still while Hester went on:
“The night she went away she undressed her baby herself; she wouldn’t let me touch him, and all the time she did it she was whispering, and cooing, and crying-like over him, and she kissed his face and arms, and even his little feet, and said once aloud so I in the next room heard her, ‘My poor darling, my pet, my precious one, will you ever hate your mother?’”
“Hester, I cannot hear another word of that. Don’t you see you are killing me?” Roger said, and this time the tears streamed in torrents down his face, and his voice was choked with sobs.
Hester heeded him now, and there were tears on her wrinkled face as she laid her hand pityingly on his golden brown hair and said, “Poor boy, I won’t harrer you any more. I’ll stick to the pint, which is that your mother, after you was asleep, and just afore I left her for the night, came up to me in her pretty coaxin’ way, and told me what a comfort I was to her, and said if anything ever was to happen that Roger should have no mother, she would trust me to care for him before all the world, and she made me promise that if anything should happen, I would never desert Roger, but love him as if he was my own, and consider his interest before that of any one else. I want you to mind them words, ‘consider his interest before any one else’ for that’s the upshot of the whole thing. I promised to do it. I swore I would do it, and I’ve kep’ my word. Next morning she was gone, and in a week or so was drownded dead off Cape Hattrass, where I hope I’ll never go, for there’s allus a hurricane there when there ain’t a breath no wheres else. I sot them words down. I’ve read ’em every Sunday since as regular as my Bible, and that fetches me to the mornin’ the Squire was found dead.
“That woman had been here a few months before, workin’ on his pride and pisenen’ his mind, till he was drove out of his head, and you not here, either, to prove it was a lie by your face, which, savin’ the eyes and hair, is every inch an Irving. He acted crazy like, and mad them days, as Aleck and me noticed, and he made another will, after that woman was gone to Boston, and a spell after she went home for good. Aleck went up in the mornin’ to make a fire here in this very room, and, sittin’ in his chair, he found the Squire stark dead, and cold and stiff, and he come for me who was the only other body up as good luck would have it, and I not more’n half dressed. There was the will, lyin’ open on the table, as if he had been readin’ it, and I read it, and Aleck, too; ’twas this same will, and my blood biled like a caldron kittle, and Aleck fairly swore, and we said, what does it mean? There was a letter on the table, too, a finished letter for Roger, and I read it, and found the reason there. The Squire’s conscience had been a smitin’ him ever since he did the rascally thing, and at last he’d made up his mind to add a cod-cill, and he seemed to have a kind of forerunner that he should never see Roger agin, and so he tried to explain the bedivelment and smooth it over and all that, and signed himself, ‘Your affectionate father.’”